Isaac Witkin was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1936. At the age of 21 the sculptor moved to London where he attended St. Martin’s School of Art. It is during this time, the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, that St. Martin’s established a reputation for being the most exciting place in Britain to study sculpture. In large part this was due to the stellar faculty that Witkin encountered—one of his teachers being sculptor Sir Anthony Caro. He later served as an apprentice to British sculptor, Henry Moore from 1961-1963. Witkin gained a reputation during this time for his bold constructivist steel works.

In 1965, Witkin emigrated to the United States and became a professor at Bennington College, from 1965-79. In the 1980s, Witkin expanded his sculptural vocabulary by continuing to experiment with with foundry techniques and began his collobartive relationship with The Johnson Atelier. Witkin liked to pour molten metal directly into a bed of sand, drawing the metal into shapes as it hardened. These shaped created by the cooled and hardened metal served as points of departure and inspired the forms in his work.

Witkin lived and worked in Pemberton, NJ at the time of his death, April 23, 2006.

Biography of Isaac Witkin

Video by Tamar Witkin, 2016

Paintings featured by Thelma Appel, biographical information and some images of Isaac Witkin's life and work.

Biography of Isaac Witkin (extended)

Video by Tamar Witkin, 2016

11.22 min.

Paintings featured by Thelma Appel, biographical information and some images of Isaac Witkin's life and work.

Smithsonian American Art Museum

Artist Biography

An original member of the group of sculptors known as the "New Generation" who formed the avant-garde of British sculpture after World War II, Isaac Witkin was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and studied with Anthony Caro at St. Martin's School of Art in London in the late fifties. After teaching and exhibiting in Britain, he traveled to the United States to take up an artist's residency at Bennington College, where he stayed on, in company with Caro and other former St. Martin's sculptors, for many years. In 1965 his work was featured in the seminal Primary Structures exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York.

During the sixties and seventies, Witkin's Constructivist assemblages gradually began to take on new volumes in an attempt to break out of what he perceived as the formulaic quality of modernist sculpture. In the late seventies the artist's breakthrough came in his "Spill" series, which incorporated the accidental shapes of large stainless-steel "spills," the circles left over from steelmaking. He resumed working in bronze, pouring the molten metal directly into shaped sand to produce forms that were far more spontaneous than traditional cast sculpture.

In his work from the late eighties onward, Witkin has pursued two distinctive approaches to bronze sculpture. His small hallucinatory poured works have a fantastic, expressive quality, while his monumentally scaled sculptures are cast and joined together in a centuries-old tradition.

National Museum of American Art (CD-ROM) (New York and Washington D.C.: MacMillan Digital in cooperation with the National Museum of American Art, 1996)

The New York Times, 2006

Isaac Witkin, 69, Innovator in Abstract Metal Sculpture, Is Dead

April 29, 2006

By Ken Johnson

Isaac Witkin, a sculptor whose bold, colorful abstractions helped to shake up the art scenes in London and New York in the 1960's, died on Sunday at his home in Pemberton, N.J. He was 69.

The cause was a heart attack, said his daughter Nadine Witkin.

In his 20's in London, Mr. Witkin was part of a new generation of artists who changed the face of British sculpture. His brightly colored fiberglass works were non-representational but had a witty, Pop Art-like look. He had his first solo exhibition in 1963 at the Rowan Gallery in London and two years later was included in an important show at the Whitechapel Art Gallery called ''The New Generation: 1965.''

In 1966 his work appeared in one of Minimalism's defining exhibitions, the famous ''Primary Structures'' show at the Jewish Museum in New York.

In later decades Mr. Witkin produced elegant abstractions in welded steel and cast bronze, which he exhibited at Marlborough Gallery in the 70's, at Hirschl & Adler Galleries in the 80's and in the last two decades at Locks Gallery in Philadelphia. Isaac Witkin was born on May 10, 1936, in Johannesburg. He attended the St. Martin's School of Art (now Central St. Martins College of Art and Design) in London, where he studied with the sculptor Anthony Caro, and his fellow students included the sculptors Barry Flanagan, Phillip King, and William Tucker, who all achieved international reputations.

After finishing his formal studies in 1960, Mr. Witkin worked as an assistant to Henry Moore for two and a half years before returning to St. Martin's to teach. In 1965 he took a teaching position at Bennington College in Bennington, Vt. In the 60's the school was a magnet for modernist artists like Mr. Caro, Kenneth Noland, Paul Feeley and Jules Olitski, who, along with the critic Clement Greenberg, collectively came to be known in the art world as ''the Green Mountain boys.'' Mr. Witkin taught at Bennington until 1979.

After moving to Bennington, he created welded steel works reflecting the influences of Mr. Caro and David Smith, joining heavy industrial steel forms with complex Cubist compositions. From the late 70's on, he worked mainly in bronze. He poured molten metal into sand molds, creating organic forms that he assembled into monumental sculptures recalling the works of his mentor Moore.

Mr. Witkin, who became an American citizen in 1975, moved to New Jersey in the early 80's. In 1987 he bought a 22-acre blueberry farm in Pemberton and lived there the rest of his life. After leaving Bennington, Mr. Witkin held teaching positions at Middlebury College, Parsons School of Design, the Philadelphia College of Art (now part of the University of the Arts) and, most recently, Burlington County Community College in New Jersey.

Mr. Witkin's marriage to Thelma Appel Johnson ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Nadine, of Manhattan, he is survived by another daughter, Tamar Witkin-Marcus of Milford, Conn.; his brother, Jacob Witkin of Burbank, Calif.; and his sister, Deborah Witkin of Johannesburg.